Knowing .NETSometimes a coder who writes, sometimes a writer who codes. Formerly, a coder who edited magazines.

April 17, 2004

In a comment on Scoble’s “persuasion” post, there’s a link to this entry by Dave Winer in which he dreams of saving Apple by dint of a $1 billion checkbook and slavish devotion to software developers. sed/Apple/Sun/ and it’s a timely read.

Scoble asks “How do you persuade?” in which he poo-poos consistent positive statements and talks up authority. It turns out there are scientific studies. According to Robert B. Cialdini’s February 2001 Scientific American article “The Science of Persuasion” (my research library can beat up your research library!) the 6 keys to reciprocity are: reciprocation, consistency (get people to say “yes”), social validation (many people doing it), liking, authority, and scarcity. Cialdini has a book: “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.” I guess I found Scoble his Christmas present.

Omer van Kloeten speculates that the reason no one’s asked me about C# on the JVM as part of the Sun-Microsoft agreement is because the JVM is explicitly the “Java” VM and .NET explicitly decoupled language and VM. Let’s see: according to Jason Bock there are 32 compilers available for .NET. According to Robert Tolksdorf there are 181 compilers for Java (and I didn’t count preprocessors).

Obviously, Java’s been around for a longer time. Obviously, these are both incomplete pages that have experimental, unfinished, and moribund projects. We can talk about platform strategies and how things might be in the future, but as things stand today the JVM is a more diverse platform than .NET